XML sitemaps, explained without the jargon

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Here is XML sitemaps without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

Only list pages you actually want indexed. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Making it stick

Keep it current or it works against you. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about XML sitemaps before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.